French in Taipei: Aux Champs sur Marne

First things first:

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Cuisine: French

Location: Xin An St. No. 161, Taipei, Taiwan.

Price Range: $$$

Food: **

Service: **

Overall: **

Every time I’m back home I end up going to a few places to eat that my dad, relatives, or family friends have found since the last time I’ve been back. The story is usually goes like this – they’ve found a great new restaurant, and the food there is spectacular. As a result, they’ve been back a couple times already in the span of a few short months, and the owner/ maitre d’/ executive chef greets them by name¹ and sometimes trots out dishes² that are nowhere to be found on the menu.

So understandably, I was excited when some family friends told us they had found a great French place that served rustic, authentic French food. Sadly, this was one of the rare times that I was decidedly underwhelmed by a fine dining establishment in Taipei.

The restaurant is very small – by my count, it seats maybe 30 people. The kitchen is in plain view of the dining room, separated only by the expediting station. Given that, I would have expected service to be attentive, or at least not be poor enough to leave me with a bad impression. Especially considering that the restaurant doesn’t do a la carte at all (instead offering multiple options for a set menu consisting of a soup, salad, optional appetizer, entrée, and dessert), you would think that they would have the pacing of the meal down to a tee. Instead, there was a 30-minute delay between our salad and appetizers, followed by a 20-minute delay between our appetizer and main course. Which, for the people who didn’t bother with the appetizers, translated into almost an hour-long wait³.

Even worse, the food simply wasn’t very good. It wasn’t bad, either – it was just that there was always one component to each dish that I didn’t care for. Instead of talking in generalities⁴, here’s a more in-depth recap of my meal at Aux Champs Sur Marne:

Left: Apricot, Ricotta, Berries. Middle: Salami, Pesto, Pickled Cucumber. Right: Salmon, and honestly, I can't remember for the life of me what the hell that orange looking sauce was.

Amuse-bouche: A pedestrian beginning to a pedestrian meal. Why were the bites served on Ritz crackers? I have no idea. The chef imports his bread from France so that it has an authentic flavor, but can’t be bothered to drum up something more ingenious than two whole Ritz cracker for a dish that’s meant to showcase the creativity of his cuisine, apparently.

French onion soup

Soup: The croutons in the soup were delicious. These garlicky croutons were the undoubted highlight of my meal. Which is not at all a good thing when you think about it. Also the soup managed to hit that balance of being flavorful without being overpowering, and in general I am a sucker for a good French onion soup. There was no cheese at all in this soup, though, which I was extremely disappointed with, especially considering that I was told the food was going to be authentic.

Imported bread from France

Garlic-sauteed mushroom salad

Salad: The dish was plated so that the mushroom was literally at the forefront of the plate. Which was apt, because the garlic flavor was so powerful that it muted everything else on the plate.  The mushrooms were delicious because of that flavor, but they seemed like they belonged in a steakhouse as a side dish (which I would have loved). Instead the flavor masked what I thought was a very decent balsamic dressing on the salad.

Escargot "gratin"

Appetizer: The escargot I had here was way fishier than any that I had previously had, and I really did not care for it. The fishiness also emanated into the gratin, making this dish a total miss for me.

Green apple sorbet with brandy

Palate cleanser: This dish was complimentary, perhaps due to the aforementioned service mishaps. But they only gave our table of six two of these for some reason. Which is fine because it meant that only two of us had to taste this. I could tell the green apple sorbet was refreshing and subtly sweet, which I liked a lot. Too bad the intense taste of brandy completely overtook the sorbet and left an insanely bitter after taste in my mouth. As palate cleansers go, this one was one big epic FAIL. It came closer to nuking my palate than cleaning it.

Duck breast confit, apple tatin, Dijon mustard, seasonal vegetables

Entrée: The duck managed to be cut into slices that were just too big and chewy to eat in one bite, but the duck was just south of tender so that it was decently difficult to break the slices down into smaller pieces. The accoutrements to this dish were decent – the sweetness of the apple tatin and the bite to the Dijon mustard, plus yet another sauce that I can’t name because there was no explanation of the dish, all paired well with the duck. However, the seasonal vegetables to the side were dreadful. Why the fuck was there a bland mishmash consisting of a Chinese long bean, a mushroom stem, an ear of baby corn, a slice of zucchini, and a cherry tomato⁵ on my plate? It added absolutely nothing, and on an entrée that was very flavorful, managed to be completely devoid of taste. This shitstorm of vegetables is something that I would have expected to receive at a chain western restaurant designed to cater to the masses of Taipei, not a small French restaurant trying to emphasize authenticity.

Vanilla ice cream, blueberry and banana crepe

Dessert: I was pretty much ready for the meal to end at this point, as I am now with my lengthy post nitpicking about the meal. Let’s just say that the crepe was a little bit too thick for me, but otherwise the dessert wasn’t bad.

Last thoughts: like I said, I felt that everything managed to miss the boat by just a bit one way or another. Overall, a wholesomely forgettable dining experience. Especially for the price point, I wouldn’t be able to justify recommending this place to anyone.

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^{1. My uncle David has been to a certain Japanese restaurant in Taipei so many times in the last few months that they keep a set of chopsticks engraved with his name there for his personal use.↩}

^{2. A good friend of my dad’s claims that he once frequented an Italian establishment so often that to switch things up he once asked the chef/ owner to make him porridge instead. As the story goes, the porridge was as fantastic as the restaurant’s Italian food.↩}

^{3. Food worth waiting over an hour for: Hot Doug’s and Kuma’s Corner. And at least there you’re warned that you’ll be waiting for hours and hours to eat.↩}

^{4. Which I promised I wouldn’t do when it comes to reviewing restaurants!↩}

^{5. The fact that they plated an entire cherry tomato (instead of halves) really bothered me. Because the cherry tomato had been either blanched or boiled, I was beyond worried that when I picked it up with a fork the entire tomato would collapse and spew tomato juice all over the table.↩}